John Brook | |
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 John Brook, self-portrait | |
| Born | 1924 Woonsocket, Rhode Island, U.S. |
| Died | July 29, 2016 (aged 92) Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Harvard University |
| Known for | Photography |
John Brook (1924-2016) was a Boston photographer who gained national recognition in the mid-20th century.
He was born to English immigrant parents in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, in 1924. He taught himself photography as a child, and won first prize in a national competition at the age of 12. He attended Harvard University, graduating in 1947. [1]
English Americans are Americans whose ancestry originates wholly or partly in England. In the 2017 American Community Survey, English Americans are (7.1%) of the total population.
After college he opened a studio on Newbury Street in Boston. He rose to prominence as a portraitist in the 1950s, photographing celebrities such as composer Igor Stravinsky, jazz musicians Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, and Thelonious Monk, prima ballerina Maria Tallchief, and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. On the strength of this work he became the staff photographer for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. [1] [2]
Newbury Street is located in the Back Bay area of Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States. It runs roughly east-to-west, from the Boston Public Garden to Brookline Avenue. The road crosses many major arteries along its path, with an entrance to the Mass Pike westbound at Mass Ave. Newbury Street is a destination known for its many retail shops and restaurants.
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was a Russian-born composer, pianist, and conductor. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century.
Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was an American composer, pianist, and leader of a jazz orchestra, which he led from 1923 until his death over a career spanning more than fifty years.
Brook's photographs were published widely in magazines such as Time , Vogue , Popular Photography , [1] and ARTnews . [3] In 1959 he was featured in the New Talent issue of Art in America . [4] In 1966 he was one of 20 photographers whose work was featured in Life magazine's 30th Anniversary Photography Special Issue; others included Richard Avedon, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Robert Doisneau. [1] [5] He exhibited at venues around the world, including the biennial photography festival in Milan, where he won a gold medal in 1960; a solo exhibition at the George Eastman Museum in 1961; [6] the 1964/1965 New York World's Fair; Expo 67 in Montreal; and the 1970 World's Fair in Osaka. [1]
Time is an American weekly news magazine and news website published in New York City. It was founded in 1923 and originally run by Henry Luce. A European edition is published in London and also covers the Middle East, Africa, and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong. The South Pacific edition, which covers Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands, is based in Sydney. In December 2008, Time discontinued publishing a Canadian advertiser edition.
Vogue is a fashion and lifestyle magazine covering many topics including fashion, beauty, culture, living, and runway. Vogue began as a weekly newspaper in 1892 in the United States, before becoming a monthly publication years later. It is a politically left-leaning magazine.
Popular Photography, formerly known as Popular Photography & Imaging, also called Pop Photo, was a monthly American consumer magazine that at one time had the largest circulation of any imaging magazine, with an editorial staff twice the size of its nearest competitor.
Boston artist Steven Trefonides cited Brook as a formative influence. [7]
An accident in the 1990s left him disabled, forcing him to give up photography. He died on July 29, 2016, in a Boston-area nursing home. [1]
The Boston Public Library owns a large number of his prints. His work is also included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, [8] the Art Institute of Chicago, [9] the Museum of Modern Art, [10] the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, [11] the Danforth Museum, [12] and many other museums and private collectors.
The Boston Public Library is a municipal public library system in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, founded in 1848. The Boston Public Library is also the Library for the Commonwealth of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts; all adult residents of the commonwealth are entitled to borrowing and research privileges, and the library receives state funding. The Boston Public Library contains approximately 24 million volumes, and electronic resources, making it the third-largest public library in the United States behind only the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library. In fiscal year 2014, the library held over 10,000 programs, all free to the public, and lent 3.7 million materials.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the United States. With 6,953,927 visitors to its three locations in 2018, it was the third most visited art museum in the world. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among seventeen curatorial departments. The main building, on the eastern edge of Central Park along Museum Mile in Manhattan's Upper East Side is by area one of the world's largest art galleries. A much smaller second location, The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, contains an extensive collection of art, architecture, and artifacts from Medieval Europe. On March 18, 2016, the museum opened the Met Breuer museum at Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side; it extends the museum's modern and contemporary art program.
The Art Institute of Chicago, founded in 1879 and located in Chicago's Grant Park, is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the United States. Recognized for its curatorial efforts and popularity among visitors, the museum hosts approximately 1.5 million guests annually. Its collection, stewarded by 11 curatorial departments, is encyclopedic, and includes iconic works such as Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Pablo Picasso's The Old Guitarist, Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, and Grant Wood's American Gothic. Its permanent collection of nearly 300,000 works of art is augmented by more than 30 special exhibitions mounted yearly that illuminate aspects of the collection and present cutting-edge curatorial and scientific research.
His photographs can also be found in two published volumes: A Long the River Run (Scrimshaw Press, 1970) and Hold Me (Aura Publications, 1977). [1]
Yousuf Karsh, was an Armenian-Canadian photographer known for his portraits of notable individuals. He has been described as one of the greatest portrait photographers of the 20th century.
Walker Evans was an American photographer and photojournalist best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans's work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8×10-inch (200×250 mm) view camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent".
Robert Frank is a Swiss-American photographer and documentary filmmaker. His most notable work, the 1958 book titled The Americans, earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and nuanced outsider's view of American society. Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014, said The Americans "changed the nature of photography, what it could say and how it could say it. [ . . . ] it remains perhaps the most influential photography book of the 20th century." Frank later expanded into film and video and experimented with manipulating photographs and photomontage.
Susan Meiselas is an American documentary photographer. She has been associated with Magnum Photos since 1976 and been a full member since 1980. She is best known for her 1970s photographs of war-torn Nicaragua and American carnival strippers.
David Seymour, or Chim, was a Polish photographer and photojournalist.
Eugène Atget was a French flâneur and a pioneer of documentary photography, noted for his determination to document all of the architecture and street scenes of Paris before their disappearance to modernization. Most of his photographs were first published by Berenice Abbott after his death. An inspiration for the surrealists and other artists, his genius was only recognized by a handful of young artists in the last two years of his life, and he did not live to see the wide acclaim his work would eventually receive.
Garry Winogrand was an American street photographer from the Bronx, New York, known for his portrayal of U.S. life and its social issues, in the mid-20th century. Though he photographed in California, Texas and elsewhere, Winogrand was essentially a New York photographer.
Charles Sheeler was an American painter and commercial photographer. He is recognized as one of the founders of American modernism, developing a style of painting known as Precisionism and becoming one of the master photographers of the 20th century.
The George Eastman Museum, the world's oldest museum dedicated to photography and one of the world's oldest film archives, opened to the public in 1949 in Rochester, New York.
Constantine "Costa" Manos is a Greek-American photographer known for his images of Boston and Greece. His work has been published in Esquire, Life, and Look. He is a member of Magnum Photos.
Anthony Bannon was the seventh director of the George Eastman Museum He officially retired in May 2012 after 16 years at the Eastman Museum, the longest tenure in the museum's history. During his tenure, Bannon launched programs in photo and film preservation, acquired the Technicolor and Merchant Ivory Productions archives, and established an online presence for the museum's classic images. Bannon is now the executive director of the Burchfield Penney Art Center on the campus of State University College at Buffalo, where he had already served as director prior to joining the George Eastman Museum in 1996.
Larry Silver is an American photographer. He was born in the Bronx. While a student at the High School of Industrial Art in Manhattan he met members of the Photo League, among them Lou Bernstein, W. Eugene Smith and Weegee. He won a first prize in the Scholastic-Ansco Photography Awards, and a scholarship to the Art Center School in Los Angeles. Silver takes black-and-white photographs, mainly documenting the places he has lived: Santa Monica Beach, California; New York City; and Westport, Connecticut.
Nathan Lyons was an American photographer, curator, and educator. He exhibited his photographs from 1956 onwards, produced books of his own and edited those of others.
Milton Halberstadt (1919–2000) had an illustrious career in fine art and commercial photography that spanned seven decades and left a body of work covering genres from abstract art to commercial photography.
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Manuel Rivera-Ortiz is a stateside Puerto Rican photographer. He is best known for his social documentary photography of people's living conditions in less developed nations. Rivera-Ortiz lives in Rochester, New York, in New York City and in Zurich.
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